The argument is not against generosity. The argument is against the structure through which generosity is currently channelled — a structure that has demonstrated, across decades and billions of dollars, a remarkable capacity to sustain itself while producing outcomes that are, at best, modest relative to the resources deployed.
The charity model, as practised at scale by the ultra-wealthy, is broken. Not in its intention. In its architecture.
The Numbers That Expose the Problem
Global philanthropic giving by the ultra-wealthy exceeds $150 billion annually.
Poverty, preventable disease, and educational inequality — the three primary targets of this giving — have not been eliminated or even substantially reduced in proportion to the capital deployed. The organisations that receive the capital have grown. The problems they were created to solve have not shrunk commensurately.
This is not a coincidence. It is a consequence of the incentive structures embedded in the philanthropic model.
Charitable foundations are evaluated on inputs — how much was donated, how many programmes were funded, how many reports were published. They are not evaluated on outcomes — whether the poverty rate in the target geography actually declined, whether the disease burden was measurably reduced, whether educational attainment improved.
An organisation that consistently fails to reduce the problem it was created to address can, in the current philanthropic architecture, continue to attract funding indefinitely by demonstrating effort rather than results.
What the Ultra-Wealthy Are Beginning to Understand
The most sophisticated philanthropists of the current generation — and there are a growing number of them — have stopped asking “how much shall we give?” and started asking “what actually works?”
The answers are uncomfortable. They implicate not just the recipient organisations but the donors themselves — who have sometimes preferred giving to institutions that celebrate them over giving to mechanisms that outperform them.
Effective altruism, for all its current controversy, asked the right question: if the goal is to reduce suffering, what deployment of capital produces the most reduction per dollar? The answer is almost never a gala dinner, a named building, or a foundation that spends 35% of its budget on administration.
What Works Instead
Direct cash transfers to individuals in poverty, at scale, have demonstrated outcomes that dwarf traditional aid programmes in multiple peer-reviewed studies. Vaccination programmes with verifiable delivery chains produce returns in healthy life years that no hospital building programme matches.
Political and policy investment — the kind that changes the rules rather than working within broken ones — is arguably the highest-leverage philanthropic capital available. It is also the least popular with donors who prefer their giving to be visible and uncontroversial.
The Challenge
The ultra-wealthy who are genuinely committed to outcomes face a social cost for changing the model.
The gala circuit, the named professorship, the hospital wing — these are the currency of a philanthropic culture that rewards visibility over impact. Opting out of that currency in favour of anonymous, evidence-based giving produces better outcomes and fewer invitations.
Most principals are not yet willing to make that trade.
The ones who are have already changed more than the ones who are not.
Give less. Give better. The planet needs the second word, not the first.
